Novel`s Plot Drops From Sky

BOOKS

April 25, 1993

In his novel Fearless (Warner, $18.95, 308 pp.), Rafael Yglesias gets right to the heart of one of modern life`s central anxieties. Max, an architect who has lived his life in fear, is traveling from New York to California in company with his partner Jeff when their airliner develops problems staying aloft.

Also on board is Carla and her 2-year-old son, Leonardo. Unable to fasten his seat belt correctly, she follows the advice of a nervous flight attendant and holds him in her lap.

As the plane dips and rises, offering terror, then hope, Max grows calmer while Jeff, who mocked his fear of flying, becomes afraid. Certain they are about to die, remembering his own plane trips as a child, Max leaves his friend to offer consolation to a boy traveling alone.

Just as the plane is about to touch down, with Carla rejoicing at their good fortune, the aircraft crashes.

Finding himself alive in the wreckage, Max takes the boy in hand, rescues a baby, and makes his way off the plane -- passing Jeff`s severed face. Carla runs in horror from the carnage and the flames, not realizing she doesn`t have Leonardo until she is safely outside.

HOW IT FEELS TO CRASH

All this happens at the very outset of the novel, and Yglesias gives it virtuoso treatment. His descriptions of what this kind of crash would look like from the inside and what it would feel like to its victims are precise and apparently technically accurate.

But for all the effort he expends on this crucial passage, it is only the set-up to the rest of the story: How a violent, senseless brush with death places people under revealing stress.

At this point, I must register a mild protest at what might be called the ``test-tube`` novel -- make something terrible happen to nice people so as to write about how they react. It has become so common as to constitute a new genre of middle-brow realism.

Often, the results are insightful and entertaining; nonetheless, it smacks of gimmickry. This kind of novel defines its characters against the worst thing that ever happened to them. Everything we know about Max or Carla has to do with their status as surviving victims of an airplane crash.

It would be far better if the accident were presented in the context of their overall lives, as 19th-century realism would have done, instead of the other way around.

ENGAGING CHARACTERS

Max and Carla are, I must concede, endearingly courageous characters. Yglesias is smart enough to leave the rough edges; he makes them interesting without resorting to sentimentality. Max is moved to confront the falseness of his life, having left his fear behind in the crash, and determines to live moment to moment by an evolving code of rigorous honesty.

Carla, by contrast, blames herself for Leonardo`s death, and sinks into a crippling depression. She withdraws from her husband, takes to her bed, devotes herself to prayers for her dead son.

Max, to his chagrin, is lionized by the media as the hero of the crash. He gets drawn into a surrogate-father relationship with Byron, the boy he saved, who turns out to be something of a brat. All come under pressure from their attorney -- they hire the same man -- to slant testimony in their damage suit against the airline.

Of course, in all this post-traumatic confusion, Max and Carla find one another and together attain healing. Again, Yglesias resists temptation, this time that of easy romance. The relationship between these two damaged and scoured people is complex and true-to-life.

While there may be, as I believe, a formula to this kind of fiction that diminishes it as literature, it`s not an easy one to master. In Fearless, Yglesias performs it well. If you`ve liked Tyler, Miller, Hoffman or Brown, you will certainly enjoy this novel.